In 2010, after this early post where I started comparing and collecting old-and-new images indicating wheelchair accessibility, my collaborator Brian Glenney suggested we create something like a stencil to alter existing signs—something that would involve spray paint, since he’s done a lot of graffiti.

After a number of conversations, we created this first prototype, as some of you have seen in this post. No paint, but a sticker:

But we knew it wasn’t quite right. I kept working, drawing various possible figures, and we debated the best form suited to the intervention: Should it cover over and completely replace the old icon? Would it be a magnet, or a decal? What were we hoping to accomplish?

Over the year, I’ve kept tabs on all the many human icons that exist in our everyday signage, and I’m always astonished to see how animated and evocative these signs can be:

If these images can be so simple, elegant, and active, why is the standard wheelchair-user represented in such wooden, static form? Wheeling a chair is often a very physical activity—but this visual has the person synonymous with the machine:

When creating our new prototype, I fought hard to see the old image underneath. There was something tempting, of course, about the idea of a wholesale re-design—just slap it on, and change the entire message. But I liked the deliberation in evolving the icon instead. I wanted to draw attention to the old image (since it’s one of those that’s at once familiar and utterly forgettable)—and to suggest its becoming something else.

And then I stumbled on MONU journal, whose current call for submissions named this very thing I’d been vaguely insisting on. MONU’s claiming that it’s urban editors, rather than urban planners, who are at work making our built environment. Freed from the grandiose mandate to create new utopias, replacing old with new, architects and planners of all kinds will be charged instead with “selecting, correcting, condensing, organizing, or modifying the existing urban material.”

Abler was run by Sara Hendren between 2009 and 2017. I tracked and commented on art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, the future of human bodies in the built environment, and related ideas.

It was a time when discussions on the web weren't yet entirely dominated by social media, and it was an exciting moment to be blogging—putting together unlikely bedfellows next to one another, magazine-style, to see what sense could be made by thinking aloud, together. I was writing about prosthetics in the ordinary sense, but also about assistive technologies in the far less ordinary sense: low tech tools, hybrid technologies, art works, and more. The ideas were associatively connected, restless with questions. And all of it, in retrospect, was a platform, a runway for me to write myself into a mode of working as a design researcher and artist.

You can see some of my current and ongoing projects—making, writing, speaking, and even, yes, still blogging—here.

I tweet. You can use this site by going straight to the archives for past posts, or you can use the guide here on the home page.